Ex-French First Lady Dishes on Life with François Hollande in Surprise Tell-All

Valérie Trierweiler, former partner of François Hollande, at his 2012 inauguration ceremony., From WikiCommons.

__Valérie Trierweiler,__the former companion of French president __François Hollande,__doesn't mince words in a new book about the couple's split, due to land with a bang on Paris bookshelves tomorrow.

Among the bolder claims Trierweiler makes in Merci Pour Ce Moment (or Thanks for the Moment), as excerpted inLe Monde(via Bloomberg News), is that Hollande, a Socialist who has channeled populist sentiment, secretly loathes the poor. According to Trierweiler, he privately mocks the lower classes as “les sans-dents,” or “the toothless.”

Trierweiler's willingness to dish is unsurprising. A journalist who spent years as Hollande's partner, she moved out of the presidential palace this year, after reports surfaced in January of the 60-year-old president's affair with 42-year-old actress __Julie Gayet.__Trierweiler, 49, writes of swallowing a hefty dose of sleeping pills and spending eight days in a hospital after learning of the affair. “I want to sleep, I don't want to go through the hours that’ll follow,” she recalls thinking, in the book.

As she recovered, Trierweiler resolved to record the scathing details of her life with the president in what became a 300-plus-page tell-all. Interestingly, Trierweiler writes that the president tried to woo her back shortly after her release from the hospital.

“He tells me he wants to win me back like I was an election,” she writes in another passage excerpted by Paris Match magazine. “Does he believe what he writes? Or am I the latest whim of a man who hates losing?”

The memoir comes at a tough time for Hollande, whose popularity has waned in recent opinion polls. And Trierweiler's revenge campaign maintained the element of surprise. Hollande was reportedly unaware of Trierweiler’s book.